What damaged our feeder?

What animal likely did this damage to our bird feeder?

Ouch! It looks like somebody pulled off a seed heist!

It’s hard to give a definitive answer, but there are a few clues in this whodunnit:

• Only the plastic “window” portion of the feeder has been cracked; there’s no visible damage to the wooden parts.
• Nobody has pilfered the suet-cake portion of the feeder.

A raccoon or bear would likely have snatched the cakes during a raid, so we can probably rule them out as suspects.

Based on that, my top suspect would be some kind of squirrel. (Here at The West Woods, we’ve had hungry squirrels inflict similar levels of damage when trying to pry those plastic windows open!) Both Gray Squirrels and Fox Squirrels would be hefty enough to have perpetrated this crime:

Eastern Gray Squirrel, a.k.a. “Sticky Fingers”

Eastern Fox Squirrel, a.k.a. “The Window Wrangler”

Luckily, that should be easy to repair: another pane of plastic or glass should slide into the grooves that held the original. The next phase of the investigation is figuring out how the squirrels might be gaining access to your bird feeder. Good luck!

-Naturalist Chris Mentrek